THE CONTROL OF LAUNDRIES
Stn,—I would be grateful if I might be allowed to bring to your notice what seems to be a very dangerous gap in our defences against disease. During the past few years there has been a very striking change in one of the most important departments of social hygiene. Until quite recently the commercial laundries have had to deal only with the linen of people brought up in a tradition of fastidious personal cleanliness, but now people who were brought up in the slums can afford to use the laundries and are doing so in rapidly increasing numbers. But the income level of the so-called working classes can be raised very much quicker than the standard of cleanliness, with the result that the laundries are up against very urgent problems. The state of some of the clothing now sent to the laundries is quite indescribable, but it can be guessed at from an appeal recently in one of the, medical journals for some means of protecting the workers against the fleas that jump off the clothes. But verminous clothing is a very minor matter. Very much more important is the danger of the spread of such diseases as scarlet fever. Hardly anything is known about how diseases are spread, and it would be a very bold medical man who would say that there is no danger of an inefficient laundry spreading tuberculosis or infantile paralysis.
There are two main requirements. First, to protect the workers who handle the infective material; and, second, to prevent the contamination of the linen that is sent to the laundry from clean houses. A laundry is technically a factory, and the weakness in our defences is that a laundry receives no more attention from the Ministry of Health than any other factory. I enquired of the Ministry and the County Council and thCre appear to be no special regulations of any sort. To my mind, Sir, it seems to be a matter of simple commonsense that there should be special medical supervision by the Ministry of Health in order to make quite certain that in all laundries all the material is not only very thoroughly washed but also very thoroughly sterilised.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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